Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/279

Rh worlds are explained, must be set down as mere bald assertion, without a particle of evidence. In other words, we should term it arrant fudge.' The perversion at this point is involved in a wilful misapplication of the word 'principles.' I say 'wilful,' because at page 63 I am particularly careful to distinguish between the principles proper, Attraction and Repulsion, and those merely resultant subprinciples which control the universe in detail. To these subprinciples, swayed by the immediate spiritual influence of Deity, I leave, without examination, all that which the student of theology so roundly asserts I account for on the principles which account for the constitution of suns, etc." This passage, it is plain, is as indecisive as the text of the essay. On the other hand, one with Poe's wide knowledge can hardly, it would seem, have lacked knowledge of Lamarck's theories, nor was he ignorant of the then recent work, "The Vestiges," though he had not then actually read it (in a letter to Geo. E. Isbell, he inquires how far "Eureka" is at one with the "Vestiges" ). But Poe's interest does not seem to have centered on what would be now termed the biological side of the matter.

Having described the development of the universe, Poe, in passages whose sweep and power remind one of Tennyson's "Vastness," proceeds to set before us its present condition and immensity. Then, finally, he pictures the inevitable dissolution of it all, when stars and planets will at length lapse into the substance of one central orb. Here attraction will finally predominate over repulsion, complete unity obtain, and matter without attraction and repulsion will again sink "into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked, to have been created, by the Volition of God." The outcome of the whole process Poe sums up in the following words, in which he restates the old doctrine of the universe as being in a state of perpetual flux:

On the universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue; another creation and radiation, returning into itself, another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, in indulging a hope—that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever and forever and forever; a novel universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?

For, in this everlasting metamorphosis, every "creature"—to use Poe's term—both those we call living, and those to which we deny the